How can you fine-tune your content to give your users what they seek? The solution lies in Content Gap Analysis! This exercise involves evaluating your existing website pages and looking for additional or uncovered insights to optimize your pages further.
Let’s dive deeper and understand how you can leverage this SEO strategy to your benefit and satisfy user intent.
Table of Contents
What Is Content Gap Analysis?
Simply put, this process entails identifying weak spots and improvising on them to increase your chances of ranking on Google search results.
What to look for? Analyze the top-ranking competitors on Google for a given topic, and find keywords/details you haven’t yet furnished on your website.
How do we use these insights?
- Pages: Decide if you want to dedicate separate pages to them or just enhance existing blogs to add them.
- Refining: Before adding these insights to your pages, you must analyze whether they are relevant to your topic intent or not.
- How to find a content gap? You can utilize tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Semrush, and Mozbar.
Benefits Of Content Gap Analysis
We are highlighting the positive outcomes of content gap analysis:
1. Expert Positioning
- Unique Insights: You can capitalize on information gaps and position yourself as an expert.
- Competitive Edge: You can optimize your content to outrank competitors on specific keywords.
2. SEO Advantage
- Fresh Additions: You can discard or edit outdated information in your blogs or service pages. Or develop new pages.
- Google Algorithms: It also satisfies the caffeine algorithm, which constantly searches for newly published or recently updated pages.
- Boosts Underperforming Content: This strategy can be implemented to pick poorly performing pages and scale them on desired SEO metrics.
Types Of Content Gaps To Consider
Here’s a content gap checklist for the aspiring digital marketers. Compare all competitors based on these parameters, and ensure that you target those keywords where you get an edge over resulting pages in terms of these gaps
1. Content Related Gaps
- Outdated Information: Such details are no longer relevant and can even misguide users. If your business operates in a constantly evolving landscape, you must be especially careful about such gaps. However, every company should update its web pages if they are over two years old.
- Depth: See if the competitors who have targeted these keywords have provided thin or irrelevant content. And cover up this gap via new or existing pages.
2. Gaps To Align Pages With Users
- Readability: Content should captivate users and be easy to comprehend. Clear & well-structured content serves bots as well as readers.
- User Intent & Relevance: Google search results tend to rank videos, text-only content, or images for certain keywords, based on which you can tweak your pages a little and make them compatible with the search intent.
3. SEO Related Gaps
- Credibility: Consider that if you have industrial experts with vast experience, they can rank your content higher by satisfying the E-E-A-T algorithm. Or simply use confidence-building metrics to gain user trust (e.g., sales or client satisfaction rate).
- Keywords: Keywords that you haven’t targeted through your website yet.
Being attentive to these gaps will help you understand where you have scope to build pages.
Tailor Content For Users At Different Stages Of Customer Journey
While doing content gap analysis, you will need to discern whether your pages cater to users at the Awareness, Consideration, or Success stages.
- Awareness pages: The keywords of these pages target problem statements. Pages dedicated to these keywords address such problems and offer valuable insights, but they don’t convert readers into customers.
- Consideration pages: These pages compare multiple business offerings, so they could be comparison guides, detailed reviews, or “best of” blogs.
- Decision Pages: These keywords will form your transactional pages. These pages will be more brand-specific than other pages targeting different stages.
Divide topical keywords into the above-mentioned stages, and either publish new pages or update existing ones depending on what best suits your needs. The objective of this exercise is to determine what pages you can create or modify to create a smooth customer funnel.
Content Gap Analysis Tool
If you are willing to integrate this exercise into your SEO audits, then here are some tools to help you get started.
1. Ahrefs (Similar to Semrush & MozBar):
- Find top competitors for the said topic through Google search and save their URLs.
- Visit the ahrefs site, navigate the left-hand menu, and click on “content gap.”
- Insert the URL of your page as well as that of the competitor’s
- Find all the keywords that they are ranking for.
2. Google Ads Keyword Planner:
- Go to Google Adwords.
- Click on the “Tools & settings” menu.
- Under the “planning” section, click “keyword planner.”
- Save the URL of the top-ranking page for the said topic.
- Click the “Start with website” option and paste the competitor URL.
- Find all the keywords for which they are ranking.
3. Your Own Observations:
- Search for the keyword you want to rank on and save URLs of all the top competing pages.
- Use Ahrefs/Mozbar/Semrush to analyze the DR of all the ranking competitors (Domain rate).
- If their DR is less than yours, you have a chance of incorporating said keywords and ranking for them.
- If their DR is more in comparison, then look for information that they didn’t include within their page so that you can at least try to outrank them (you would have to put your critical skills to the test here).
Your local expert or consultant would have more tools to help you out with content gap analysis.
Conclusion
Content Gap Analysis forms a crucial part of your SEO audit which you can’t ignore or neglect. It offers you an opportunity window to surpass rivals and provide users what they seek. Given its SEO benefits, we have even explored tools to help you streamline this process as seamlessly as possible.
Did you find our blog helpful? Stay tuned for more updates on result-driven SEO techniques, and do share your experiences with us!
